Social media can help brands distribute marketing content and engage customers. Free analytics tools can ensure that a brand’s message is connecting with the right audience.
Here is a list of useful analytics tools to optimize your social media accounts. There are tools to track social media engagement, monitor competitors’ content, discover trending topics, get helpful suggestions on improving your social media pages, and more. All of these tools are free, though several offer premium plans, too.
Social Media Analytics Tools
Hootsuite draws on over 200 metrics that measure the impact of your social media content across channels and campaigns. Integrate with Brandwatch, KAWO, Unmetric, and more. Price: Free plan offers three social profiles, 30 scheduled messages, and one user. Paid plans start at $29 per month with a free 30-day trial.
Socialbakers is a social media marketing platform with a selection of free analytics tools. The collection includes a persona mapping template to organize cross-channel data, performance quadrant reports for Facebook and Instagram, a benchmarking tool, an analytics tool for Instagram, and more. Price: Free.
Talkwalker is a free, real-time social media search engine. With unlimited searches across all major social networks and 187 languages, get an instant overview of your campaigns and hashtags, as well as competitors’. Get real-time data and live audience insights, such as demographic information about age groups, gender, occupation, and more. Price: Free.
Cyfe provides all-in-one business dashboards to track and analyze your information. Monitor social media analytics, website traffic, sales, and more. Pull data from popular services with over 100 integrations and 250 metrics. Combine metrics from different apps to create new insights. Price: Free plan with two dashboards and a 30-day history. Paid plans start at $29 per month with a 14-day free trial.
Followerwonk is a tool to track and optimize your Twitter data. Analyze followers by location, bio, who they follow, and more. Compare follows and followers, view losses and gains, and maximize time to tweet. Know when followers are active and which tweets engage. Price: Free for one account and limited personal data. Paid plans start at $29 per month.
SparkToro, co-founded by Moz alums Rand Fishkin and Casey Henry, crawls tens of millions of social and web profiles to find what and who your audience reads, listens to, watches, follows, shares, and talks about online. Uncover which accounts reach your target audience, and discover where and how. Find the sources that reach the link-likely groups you need to grow visibility, rankings, and traffic. Price: Free plan allows five searches per month. Paid plans start at $112 per month.
Mentionmapp is an analytics tool for your Twitter network. Visualize and explore interactions, build critical relationships, and find out who is carrying conversations. Find new hashtags and followers that you might have missed otherwise. Price: Free plan allows 300 searches per month. Paid plan is $27 per month for unlimited searches.
Audiense is a marketing platform for Twitter to increase brand awareness, craft campaigns, and measure impact. Identify and understand any audience. Create tailored audiences to identify specific people and segments. Price: Free plan offers basic community reports. Paid plans start at $79 per month.
Union Metrics is an analytics platform to help businesses and brands achieve more through social media marketing. Get free social intelligence with algorithms from the paid platform. Find out when you should tweet or post on Instagram, what kinds of content receives the most engagement, and info on your top hashtags and most influential followers. Price: Free.
Zoho Social lets you schedule content in multiple ways, monitor what’s important, and create intelligent reports. Create columns to track reviews, keywords, or mentions. Discover where your followers are from, the type of content they like, what your connections are saying about you, and other metrics to analyze performance. Price: Free plan for one individual. Paid plans start at $10 for two team members.
Google Trends provides information and insights on search trends. Get information on the latest stories or areas of interest. Visit the data visualization project, where the Google News Initiative works with designers to tell stories with data and make the results open source so they can be reused. Price: Free.
Social Network Toolkits
Facebook Insights provides information about your page’s performance, such as demographic data on your audience and how people are responding to your posts. Sort posts by types, and see the demographics of your fans. Identify your reach in organic, paid, and viral searches. Price: Free.
Instagram Insights lets you learn more about your followers and how your content performs with your audience. View insights for specific posts and stories you’ve created to see how each performed and how people engaged with them. From your profile, you can access Insights in the Instagram app. Price: Free.
Twitter Analytics provides quick and informative statistics on your Twitter activity. For each month, get impressions, visits, mentions, and followers. See your top mentions and top followers. And receive suggestions on how to grow your audience. Price: Free.
Pinterest Analytics is free with a business account and lets you view your most popular pins and ads to build your media strategy. Find out how Pinterest users interact with your content. Learn which topics your audience members are interested in based on their behavior on Pinterest. Price: Free.
LinkedIn Analytics lets you evaluate the effectiveness of your updates, including posted videos. Get metrics on your visitors, including demographics and traffic sources. Access analytics for LinkedIn Career Pages and Pipeline Builder campaigns. Price: Free.
YouTube Analytics monitors the performance of your channels, videos, and content with up-to-date metrics and reports. Uncover trends to see what’s working and what’s not. Find out who’s watching and which videos could make money. Generate reports on views, traffic sources, demographics, and more. See aggregate data of the items in a group to analyze broad performance in an organized way. Price: Free.